In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the complexity in which organizations operate, including an expansion to global environments that intrinsically establish moral challenges for the members of their organizations (George, 2007; Donaldson, 2003). There are several reasons for this complexity, as the actions of individuals are receiving more scrutiny, there are more widespread requests for transparency, there is a greater need for organizations to operate across legal and governmental systems that are in competition, as well as to operate across divergent cultures that often use different sets of morals and values.
Concomitant to this increase in complexity of challenges for organizations is an escalation in the scale and breadth of greed and fraud within organizations (George, 2007). A growing contingent of governments and organizations have set up offices for ethics and have developed new policies governing ethics, as well as putting employees through compulsory ethics training (Donaldson, 2003). As organizations try to augment the moral capacity of their employees, the timing is ripe for a theoretical structure examining just what comprises “moral capacity” within the workplace, as well as an analysis of just how this capacity influences people to react to challenges of an ethical nature. As a result, the motivation for this review is to identify different ways that researchers have sought to provide a testable and comprehensive theoretical framework that can serve as a reliable basis for guiding research studies and organizational practices in the future with regard to the moral capacity necessary to manage a moral challenge from beginning to end.
The theories of moral development that Piaget (1965/1932), Kohlberg (1981) and James Rest and his colleagues (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau & Thoma, 1999) have long served as the established explanation for the ways in which people develop their sense of morals. However, there are several gaps in the paradigms that those approaches have established. First, these scholars focus on the processes through which people handle moral challenges, but they do not explain adequately the capacities that serve as the basis for those processes. For example, Rest e.a. (1999) compiled a model with four components, identifying four separate processes that combine to create behavior that is observable from an outward standpoint: moral sensitivity, judgment, motivation and action (Rest e.a., 1999, p. 101). The sensitivity process includes steps like interpretating situations, taking on roles and developing an awareness that a moral problem exists. While research shows that individuals have a wide variance in their ability to handle sensitivity (as well as the other three processes) (Bebeau, 2002), earlier research has not examined the reasons for that variance. Based on the way Rest et al. describe moral sensitivity, it would be reasonable to ask, “What gives a person the ability to carry out the steps in interpreting a particular moral challenge and then estimating the resulting cause and effect scenarios better than another person?” Another gap is that the classic theories of moral develop focus on moral judgment without looking at the capacity necessary to make those moral judgments. Kohlberg (1981) takes on the central aspects that form moral judgment, but he overlooks the capacity that is necessary in order to make that judgment. Finally, for a model of moral development to be useful, it has to explain both the cognition and the conation (or the impulse to act) from a moral perspective. The classic theories of moral development have focused primarily on the processing of moral dilemmas on a cognitive level. However, these models do not deal with the ways in which people process temptations (Monin, Pizarro & Beer, 2007), or situations in which people can identify the morally correct choice but still struggle because another personal value is conflicting with knowledge of right and wrong. This means that people have to have the capacity to regulate themselves so that they can resist a particular action and instead choose another. An example is a person who is tempted to take part in wrongdoing that other members in his or her peer group are performing, in order to gain acceptance from their peers. To overcome this temptation, the person has to have the capacity to stand firm against that temptation and instead pursue action against the people who have chosen to do something that is not moral.
Measuring ethical judgments (Bebeau, 2002; Trevino & Youngblood, 1990) has yielded fairly weak links when it comes to prediction of actual behavior that is ethical. Even so, Reynolds (2006) has noted that ethic research, by and large, has focused on models for ethical judgment rather than ethical behavior, a trend that appears throughout the literature (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008; Trevino, Weaver & Reynolds, 2006). A starting point is a recognition that people are complex in the ways in which they mentally represent knowledge domains on the basis of their learning and experience at different points in their life span, particularly with regard to differing moral domains (Narvaez, 2010). In this context, the word domain means a particular area of ethics, such as medical ethics, parenting ethics and so on. Individuals can have representations of varying complexity with regard to each type of ethics; this will depend on their development level. When complexity expands, this means that mental representations are more richly connected and have a higher level of differentiation, as well as increased elaboration (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002). One example comes from Bebeau’s (2002) research within the dental profession, showing that dentists are located along a spectrum when it comes to complex dental ethics. It is also possible for a dentist to have a lower level of moral complexity in ethics outside the dental field because he or she lacks the necessary knowledge in those areas to accept and apply information with regard to a certain dilemma with a degree of elaboration and depth.
Moral complexity is one of the most crucial moral capacities because the metrics that people use to construct meaning for the world influence their decision making processes and, ultimately, their behavior (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002; Streufert & Nogami, 1989). Individuals who have greater cognitive complexity process data more thoroughly because their processes involve a greater number of categories among which they can discriminate information that they take in within their environment. They can also see more connections and common areas among those categories. This is what led to the suggestion by Hannah, Lester and Vogelgesang (2005) that the richer the moral representation, the greater the coherence that people can achieve when they are processing moral dilemmas of complexity. The greater one’s moral complexity, the larger and more sophisticated the prototypes there are that help people to process moral information. People will then draw on those prototypes either during automatic or controlled processing of ethical incidents (Sonenshein, 2007). As a result, the notion of moral complexity is the foundation for what Werhane (1999) refers to as “moral imagination,” or the ability to comprehend the different dimensions of moral dilemmas and create a variety of ethical realities to process, while coming up with an imaginative solution. This takes place because individuals with greater cognitive complexity have the ability to process and comprehend competing pieces of information, while using more time to interpret a wider spectrum of information in order to bring dilemmas to resolution (Hannah, Lester & Vogelgesang, 2005). In their work with adolescents, Swanson and Hill (1993) concluded that a greater richness of moral knowledge led to higher levels of moral reasoning. Narvaez (2010) has suggested that people with higher moral complexity will also demonstrate a higher “negative expertise,” which means that they will know the things they should not do when faced with an ethical dilemma.
In addition to enhancing the ways in which people process moral judgments, moral complexity also should build moral sensitivity. Reynolds points out that people differ in moral attentiveness from one another; he uses this difference to suggest a need for a greater degree of sensitivity with regard to moral and ethical issues. As a result, he suggests a need for further research into the “origins of moral attentiveness” (2008: 1039). In response to this suggestion, it is worth asserting that moral complexity is a crucial precursor to moral attentiveness because individual people have a greater tendency to pay attention to information that matches their cognitive representations, while getting rid of information that does not match those representations (Dutton & Jackson, 1987). This would indicate that more identifiable prototypes or internal dimensions give people a greater chance to identify moral cues.
It is important to note that moral judgments also come with an intrinsic context, and understanding the role that those contexts play is crucial for dealing with individuals from different cultures. Organizations, societies and groups want to operate with a common value set (Victor & Cullen, 1988), but it is also true that different groups have values that can vary widely (Margolis & Phillips, 1999). Even when there is agreement about moral values and standards, the individual interpretations and applications of those standards often differ to the point of creating contention (Sonenshein, 2007). With this in mind, it is difficult to suggest an outcome more binding than the idea that greater moral complexity leads to moral judgments that are more elaborate. In general terms, then, moral complexity utilizes a richness of knowledge in content that represents the morality of a particular social group or culture. Keeping this in mind, it is important to find a model that is possible to generalize across the lines that separate organizations and cultures while specifying it within each culture by incorporating the mores, norms and virtues of that culture to distinguish what comprises behavior that is immoral, moral or amoral. In other words, moral complexity leads to moral sensitivity, as well as to the ability to integrate moral information in the decision making process. Finding ways to build this capacity pays considerable dividends in producing outcomes that show an elevated level of morality, no matter what one’s organizational context might be.
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